Spring Semester

A short vacation and then the spring semester will start. As students are arriving (or just getting out of hibernation), the campus is starting to come to life. January is known as the the Independent Activities Period (IAP) here at MIT, meaning you can do whatever pleases you. But since this is MIT, most students will attend some sort of class, workshop, training seminar or other academic-related, but fun activity. One of these activities is the Charm School, a series of tutorials that take these bright, but sometimes awkward students away from high-minded academic pursuits and teaches them how to... (gasp)... socialize. Sessions such as bathroom etiquette, how to ask someone for a date, or how to handle roommate conflicts, have been very popular in the past.

So when my landlady asked me volunteer for a Charm School session, I jumped at this opportunity to get to know some of these mythical MIT students. The session that I volunteered for was called "how to tell someone something they'd rather not hear". Like anything in life, even this "soft skill", can be condensed into a simple formula (I know miss A will disagree, but since this is MIT, we must put everything into a context that everyone will undestand). The formula is: I feel.... about... because...

The idea is to express the feelings first, then the subject and then the reason behind the feelings. Most left-brained people like me will focus on the subject and the reasons, leaving the feelings behind. But the whole point about this is the feelings. Expressing feelings is what makes people open up to accept the negative news. Hmmm, what a concept!

And thus an intresting thing happened. While I was supposed to teach others how to behave in life, I was learning a little lesson myself. A lesson which I put to use shortly thereafter when I called my new landlord to express to him my feelings of frustrations about the uncleanliness state of the new apartment and the fact that I would have to spend $100 of his own money to clean it. It must've worked because he agreed to pay whatever it would take to make the apartment livable. It just takes a little charm...